> As for the all caps rule, it is hard to understand why it was written not
to fire on a single
> excessively long word.
I'll take a guess at that one:
Single word caps subjects are likely to be an acronym or similar, and are
moderately likely, at least in US business mails.
I suspect the 'excessively long' part was never considered when writing the
exception. However, it is probably just as well that it wasn't, because
compared to English, German (just by the nature of the language) has a great
number of 'excessively long' words. That sort of rule would probably be
causing FPs all over the place.
My opinion is that it is probably time that we should be putting together
the basis of a German spam rule set. There may not be a need for a huge
number of rules yet, but it seems clear that German-language spam is
starting to show up. It will doubtless only get worse with time; after all,
Germans have a considerable amount of money they can spend, and that is what
spammers are after.
For instance that message that someone (you?) posted looked to me like it
was probably a form of a Nigerian spam. Those can be a bit slippery to
catch, especially when not done in all caps as they used to be. But there
are a number of stock phrases that show up in them, and you can build a meta
that will catch 3 or 4 of them together, and be almost certain it is a spam.
What someone would need would be 3 or 4 examples of this sort of thing to
start seeing what were the common words and phrases, and then we could start
building simple rules to look for those phrases. Of course, understanding
the language would make this task considerably easier! :-)
Loren
